“Transplanted to Better Health” chronicles Hampden Township resident Carole Fair’s journey from kidney disease diagnosis to transplant. The memoir, published via Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, is a culmination of four years of journaling, personal experiences and research into the disease and its treatments.

“I wanted to make the general public aware of the need for donors. It’s not as difficult or as troublesome a process as they may think,” Fair said. According to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, there were 6,438 Pennsylvania residents waiting for a kidney transplant in July.

Fair was diagnosed with kidney failure in 2010 and said her health quickly declined. By December of that year she was giving herself 10 hours of peritoneal dialysis a night at home to survive. After three months of dialysis her creatinine levels continued to creep up, intensifying the search for a donor kidney.

Close family friend Jeanette Diaz-Tolin volunteered to donate a kidney, but wasn’t a match. The two joined the Kidney Paired Donation List and were matched to a patient and healthy donor in Pittsburgh initiating a four-person transplant chain.

Fair’s surgery was performed Feb. 21, 2011, at Harrisburg Hospital by PinnacleHealth surgeons Harold Yang and Seth Narins. She credits the success of the surgery and her current good health to her doctors, her faith and the many prayers she received.

“You don’t know if you’re going to get the kidney. You don’t know how the surgery is going to go. I wasn’t sure I was going to have a happy ending. And when I had such excellent results I wanted to give encouragement and hope to other kidney patients and their families,” she said.